You missed a /s marker

Well then so is a Mercedes. . . . . .

But you wouldn’t steal a car, would you?

Thank you!

Halp. I don’t understand how it went from step 2 to step 3.

Classic lemmy

Well, life is about trade-offs and neither spaces or tabs are perfect in every scenario, but the industry overall prefers spaces over tabs nowadays and the tooling reflects that too. For me personally, as long as a project is consistent in its formatting and developers don’t need to fight its tooling, I’m happy with either. We can yak shave all we want (and lots of people are doing that on the internets) but I hope I at least answered your initial question about why people prefer spaces over tabs.

It makes a difference when you’re working on a large project with lots of people. Even Linux mandates 1 tab = 8 spaces.

The only argument i see in favour of tabs is the “i can change the width on my own machine!” which isn’t very convincing if you are working on a team and need to follow conventions every time you commit code. The indentation will keep looking weird on your machine.

If you’re using monospaced fonts for writing code (please tell me you are) spaces make sure that the code will look roughly the same on everyone’s machine.

def function(paramX: str,
             paramY: str,
             paramZ: str) -> int:
  pass

If I’d used tabs, the second and third parameter might not align with the first.

Also, left-side indentation is only a small part of the overall whitespace in code. You’re adding whitespace even when you write x = y. Spaces make sure that this whitespace around the = grows in the same scale as the indentation.

Google employees who work on the Linux kernel.

Lol… thanks for pointing that out. I was really confused.